The Small Faces – Itchycoo Park Lyrics | 9 years ago |
An NPR interview with Ian McLagan confirms Ronnie Lane was the one who had the inspiration for the song, co-written with help from Steve Marriott. "Dreaming spires" was a line borrowed from an Oxford brochure. Though bandmates have offered various locations as the actual park, Ronnie said it was in Ilford, and Steve specified that it was Ilford's Valentines Park. What is great about this song, though, is of course less a tribute to the place and more a tribute to the time. It's impossible to listen to this song without somehow being transported to the '60s. Even if you were not around during the era of the counter-cultural revolution in consciousness and empowerment of youth wanting to change the world, you experience it when hearing Itchycoo Park. |
Christina Aguilera – Candyman Lyrics | 10 years ago |
For Christina's "Back to Basics" album, Aguilera and Linda Perry went back to older blues and jazz material with the goal of infusing it with more beat. They took the melody of the Andrews Sisters' hit "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and gave it new lyrics, dropping the "over there" off-to-war storyline in favor of a wild night of dancing and lovemaking, a girl being swept off her feet. But such seductions were not uncommon in wartime America of the '40s. Aguilera's new lyrics still preserve the war-footing mood with the sampling of the "Tarzan and Jane swinging on a vine" Marine cadence. During war, rules about romance are often relaxed and casual lovemaking is more accepted. After all, there may be no tomorrow, which is how the girl in the song is living. She has "lost her grip" and is enjoying the fall. |
Christina Aguilera – Car Wash (feat. Missy Elliott) Lyrics | 10 years ago |
There may or may not have been a decline in the quality of music heard on radio in the 2000's, but those who romanticize the '70s as the golden age of rock must also remember what was actually being played on the radio at the time; namely, weak & watered-down disco, soft rock and country rock, spiced up with progressive and hard rock, anchored with old hits from the '60s (and even the '50s). The really cool stuff happening in music back then was often ignored by the radio stations. With that in mind, there were bright spots and off-beat songs that got lots of air-play. Like this hit from the Rose Royce soundtrack to the cult movie which shares its title with this song. Aguilera's instincts are right on the mark with this tune. The song may have been considered a disco hit, but it was the soul in it that drove its appeal. Light fare for sure, but the message just below the surface would be that many young Americans struggle in meaningless, dead-end jobs for little pay and can't take such drudgery very seriously. And who can blame them? Now, nearly 40 years later, most of America's youth face the same prospect as the car-wash workers trying to find joy in their wage-slavery. This song is more relevant now than it ever was back in 1976, and Christina has done a great job reinventing this old number. |
Talking Heads – Life During Wartime Lyrics | 10 years ago |
Classic Talking Heads satire, the song captures the pessimism of America in 1979: Jimmy Carter struggling to put the nation back together again after Nixon's resignation and pardon, Vietnam still not healed under the bandage slapped on it half-a$$ed by Ford, stagflation, lingering paranoia of Communist infiltration and fear of nuclear Armageddon as the Cold War began to wind down. Inspired by the social decay prevalent in Alphabet City, where Byrne lived at the time, the song describes a dark fantasy of America in the worst-case post-apocalyptic scenario haunting the public imagination as the USA limped out of the '70s. |
U2 – Beautiful Day Lyrics | 11 years ago |
Bono: "a man who has lost everything, but finds joy in what he still has." Beyond that, though, he reached out hopefully to her "in return for grace," but it didn't work out that way. Still, he knows he's "not a hopeless case," and, therefore, still has hope. He has hope and the memory of a beautiful day that he won't "let it get away." And that will be the grace he needs to sustain him. The beautiful day was enough. |
U2 – New Year's Day Lyrics | 11 years ago |
Whoever said this song is, at least partly, about New Year's resolutions was right. Bono's message is not very complicated, just very true: While personal love, such as love felt by a man for a women, comes easily and naturally, requiring no formal New Year's resolutions, the brotherhood of humankind is another matter. It's a noble aspiration of the chosen few who sincerely labor to make the Christian ideal of "love thy fellow man" a reality, but it comes to us far less readily. The people linking arms to bridge the divide of racial hatred and violence do so under a blood red sky while "gold is the reason for the wars we wage." In spite of the reality of love's power, such as what the singer feels for the object of his affections, declarations of resolve to bring about world peace and love between all peoples will continue to meet the fate of most New Year's resolutions: "Nothing changes on New Year's Day." |
Alanis Morissette – Surrendering Lyrics | 11 years ago |
The title says it all: "Surrendering." The topic is not so much surrender as an action, but as a process -- surrendering. Alanis flirts with the language of war throughout: "I salute you for your courage;" "adversarial forces;" "your surrender;" "threatening forces;" "your choice of armor was your intellect;" "you died and you're still standing;" "in command;" "times of true danger;" "best defense." Love, like war, involves risk, calculation, tactics. Her lover is "self-sufficient and needless," but decides to compromise his safe and secure existence because he is "taken with" her and knows "enough to begin." She applauds his perseverance, commends his wise reservation and wariness, supports his trusting; that is, he wins her respect. And it is with mutual admiration and respect that both sides agree to end their romantic battle. The surrender occurs not on one side, but on both. The song is as much about Alanis' surrender as it is about her lover's: "And I'm thrilled to let you in/Overjoyed to be let in in kind." Omnia vincit amor. |
Alanis Morissette – Utopia Lyrics | 11 years ago |
"Utopia" means "nowhere." Code for an unattainable, maybe impossible, paradise. The paradise described in the original was solely rational, and dispassionate. Orwell (and others) have carried this notion out to its logical, and possibly horrifying, extreme, but Alanis goes the other way: Hers would "be propelled by passion" and is the world dreamed of and worked for by the Youth Revolt of the '60s. A functional family, community, species and biosphere; humanity conscious of the cosmos. A post-Cold War, post-superpower world may truly be within reach, but without the passion of the heirs of that Youth Revolt ~~ say, the 99% of Occupy ~~ her dream of a world where "we'd release and disarm and stand up and feel safe" can never be achieved. Sounds like Alanis is, perhaps cautiously ~~ but realistically, hopeful and optimistic about a future whose "end" is "in sight," |
The Pogues – Lullaby Of London Lyrics | 11 years ago |
The North wind blows out of the desolate reaches of Loss, Death and the Past. The City of London is cut off from a past that remembers "the corncrake's cry," though not all of the Past is comforting, as a prayer goes out for all the howling ghosts to "sleep tight down in Hell tonight." A "wind that blows from haunted graves" may recall the misery of the Homeland, but the lonely singer prays that bright angels watch over his child this night. Ireland, ruined by England and London, is haunted by the horrors of invasion, repression and degradation, and the Irish singer must now willingly labor in London as a factory slave to keep his child warm and safe on the other shore of the Sea of Troubles. |
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